Traditional cone-beam CT interventional systems are largely “un-informed” with respect to the properties of the patient (i.e., anatomical context surrounding a given region or structure of interest) or the imaging task that needs to be conducted. Rudimentary exceptions are simple specification of the patient in generic terms of body habitus (e.g., small or large) and a generic description of task in terms of desirable image characteristics (e.g., smooth or sharp). The conventional paradigm makes no account of patient-specific characteristics or more quantitative specification of the spatial resolution, noise, and imaging task in defining the source detector scan orbit. Instead, the scan orbit is almost always entirely “prescriptive”—e.g., a circular orbit in a plane convenient for the mechanical characteristics of the scanner. As such, positioning of the interventional system (e.g., a needle or other interventional device), positioning of the source-detector throughout data acquisition (i.e. the orbital trajectory), and other acquisition parameters are conventionally selected based on coarse heuristics of body size, target location, and x-ray technique charts that typically (in a population sense) produce “good” image results.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a system and method for creating task-based and/or patient-specific trajectories for interventional imaging.